Kamikaze Page 3

  Suddenly, Kazuya found himself sweating.

  “A vial of blood?” he’d said to his uncle back in the car. “How important can that be?”

  More important, it now appeared, than he could have imagined.

  Important to Tokuda!

  The floorboards were thick wooden planks that had been laid down to squeak as they were trod upon. A nightingale floor like the singing of birds. A shogun was always in peril because the man who assassinated the shogun could become shogun himself. The same was true for the kumicho. A nightingale floor was constructed so no one could sneak up on the shogun, and that’s what gave rise to the legend that ninja assassins were able to walk on the walls and the ceiling. To get close enough to kill the shogun, an assassin would have to find a way to bypass the boards.

  The three men ceased treading when they reached a white sheet that had been spread on the floor. From dips in the cloth, Kazuya knew it covered some kind of grate. Skirting around his side of the white mat, the fat yak placed the paper containing Makoto’s bloody finger on the table at Tokuda’s feet.

  The kumicho said nothing.

  He stared at the offering, then stared at Makoto’s bandaged hand, then nodded his head.

  Never had Kazuya seen a glare as menacing as the one that fell on him. Tokuda’s eyes locked onto the slick yak’s hands. His lips moved as if he was counting fingers.

  “You dare to dishonor me?” he snarled.

  “I—” began Kazuya.

  “Shut up!” Makoto whispered.

  Tokuda beckoned his injured henchman to approach, then reached down and lifted the battle sword off the rack in front of him.

  Makoto took it.

  “You dishonor yourself,” Tokuda said, sneering at Kazuya.

  Grabbing the short sword from the rack, the kumicho passed it to the sumo-sized yak.

  Both men bowed away from their master, careful not to turn their backs on him, and returned to their original positions flanking Kazuya.

  “Sit,” Makoto said, indicating the white sheet on top of the grate.

  When Kazuya hesitated, he was shoved to the floor.

  Behind him, the young yak heard the long sword slip free of its sheath. He began to tremble when the fat yak laid the short sword on the mat in front of him, a white cloth wrapped around half of its shining blade.

  “Redeem your honor,” Tokuda ordered.

  Still refusing to believe that his failure in Vancouver had come to this, the dumbstruck yak made his most serious—and final—error by shaking his head at the kumicho.

  Shhhhewwww!

  The last sound Kazuya heard was the Divine Wind.

  Yubitsume

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  October 30, Now

  It wasn’t hard to spot them. Though a deluge of tourists came surging out of the chute from customs clearance at Vancouver International Airport, the two jumbo jets they’d arrived on had come from Asia. So not only were Joe and Chuck Hett two of few Caucasians in a mass of non-white faces, but father and son were also both a head taller than most of those around them.

  “Hi Red. Hi Dad.” Jackie greeted the two men from the sidelines.

  “How’s my favorite granddaughter?” Joe Hett replied, leaning over the waist-high Plexiglas fence that separated those deplaning from those waiting for them and wrapping his arm about her shoulders to cinch her into a hug.

  “I’m your only granddaughter.”

  “That’s why you’re my favorite.”

  “Good flight?”

  “Terrible. I got better service in bombers during the war. Look at these guys,” the octogenarian said, sweeping his arm wide to encompass the crowd. “All the way from Japan, I’ll bet they got super-service. On a hop, skip, and jump from New Mexico, I got a cup of dishwater and the chance to buy a snack.”

  “How ’bout you, Dad?”

  “Terrible,” echoed Chuck Hett, joining the three-generation family hug. “I had to listen to Red grouse most of the way.”

  “Music to your ears, son.”

  “So you think, old man.”

  “Hey!” Joe protested as he was shoved from behind. The man who’d pushed him into Jackie was a tough-looking bodyguard clearing a path for his boss, a well-protected Japanese mogul surrounded by a posse of goons. Though now in his eighties, Joe was the sort of Pacific War vet who never backed down from a fight, so he came off the Plexiglas fence like a boxer absorbing a punch. Grabbing hold of the offending hand and wrenching it aside, he surprised himself, his son, and his granddaughter with the force of his counterattack. The eldest Hett literally tore the pinky finger off the bodyguard’s palm.

  “I’m standing here!” Joe snarled, stabbing his finger at the ground and directing his challenge toward the hub of the entourage. “Tell him to back off!”

  “Easy, Red,” Chuck said soothingly. “You gotta give a speech. You want to be in a wheelchair with stitches in your face?”

  “I’m waiting!” Joe persisted, refusing to give an inch.

  From her vantage point on the other side of the barrier, Jackie suddenly saw what was really at the heart of this confrontation. The Japanese mogul was also in his eighties, so these two had faced off—at least figuratively—in the Pacific War. With half his face an ugly scar, the elderly Asian looked even tougher than Joe. If the scar dated back to the war, that was gasoline on this fire. And because he was the boss of the goon who’d given Joe the shove, her granddad was blaming his old enemy for the new insult.

  As for the fingerless man, he was ready to let Joe have it. The way his good hand was flattened, it would be a karate chop. So Jackie’s hand hovered by her holster, just in case.

  For a moment, the standoff was frozen in time.

  Jackie eyed the bodyguard.

  The bodyguard eyed Joe.

  Joe eyed the bodyguard’s boss.

  And the boss eyed Jackie’s uniform.

  A command in Japanese. No more than a single word. That’s all it took to defuse the powder keg. Reeled in by the mogul, the fingerless thug backed away from Joe. On a cue from their boss, the Japanese gangsters turned their backs dismissively on the American vet and headed for the exit.

  “Man,” Joe fumed. “I fought a war for this?”

  Still grasping the prosthetic finger, he pushed it from between the knuckles of his fist, flashing the fuck-you finger at his insulters as they left.

  “I think our pit bull’s hungry,” Chuck said to his daughter. “What shall we eat?”

  “Sushi?” Jackie suggested.

  From the airport on Sea Island, in the mouth of the Fraser River, the three Hetts drove north across the bridge toward downtown Vancouver, stopping at a White Spot Restaurant for lunch.

  “So this is where all the draft dodgers went?” observed Joe as they parked the car and walked from the lot. Typically for late autumn, the sky threatened rain.

  “The wet ones,” Jackie replied.

  The Hetts were one of America’s warrior families. Their bellicose bloodline went back to the Revolution, when Jerome Hett had fought the redcoats at the Battle of Cowpens. Since then, every generation of Hetts had engaged in war—Joe in the Pacific Theater of the Second World War and Chuck in Vietnam. Only with Jackie had the cycle been broken, and the irony was that now she wore red serge.

  “I blame you,” Joe said as they were ushered to a restaurant booth and handed menus.

  “Blame me for what?” Chuck asked.

  “Turning my only granddaughter into an ex-pat.”

  “I’m not an ex-pat, Red,” Jackie corrected. “I was born here. I have dual citizenship.”

  “Maybe,” Joe said. “But you’re a Yank at heart. If your dad hadn’t taken your mom on that tour of NORAD bases, she wouldn’t have gone into premature labor in the Arctic, and I wouldn’t have a Canuck redcoat as my heir.”

  “I’m your heir,” Chuck said.

  “You wish,” Joe chortled, winking at Jackie.

  On her suggestion, all three ordere
d the same meal: a hamburger, no fries, with a vanilla milkshake.

  “Triple-O?” the waitress asked.

  “Yes,” said Jackie, answering for the men.

  “What does that mean?” Joe asked. “Some sort of Canuck code?”

  “You’ll see, Red.”

  “He sees red all the time, our pit bull,” Chuck goaded.

  Actually, Red was a nickname that could apply to any of the three Hetts seated in the booth. With her flaming red hair and emerald green eyes—not to mention the uniform she donned for special occasions—Jackie was the best candidate for the sobriquet. Today, she sported the working uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police: a blue forage cap with a yellow band and the bison-head crest of the force just above the peak; a blue, waist-length Gortex jacket over a gray shirt and blue tie, with the words “RCMP GRC Police” on both shoulders and zippered slits along both sides to give her easy access to her handcuffs and gun; blue pants with a yellow side-stripe; and black ankle boots.

  There was still red in Chuck’s hair, though it was overpowered by a lot of gray. Today, he wore a turtleneck with a bomber jacket. Raised in the shadow of a flamboyant father, Chuck had been relegated to the role of straight man. But within their family, he gave as good as he got. Joe had helped set the Rising Sun in the east, but Chuck—in his post-Vietnam years with Strategic Air Command—had been the Hett who’d run the hammer and sickle down the flagpole. Recently, he’d retired to the Hetts’ adopted state of New Mexico, where Joe had owned a ranch in his years with the 509th.

  Red, however, had been Joe’s nickname for so long that neither Chuck nor Jackie had ever called him anything else. He wasn’t Dad or Granddad. He was simply Red. Always had been, and always would be. Red’s hair might now be white, but his personality still teetered on the edge of conflagration, ready to flare up at any moment. His face was crinkled and leathery from his decades in the Southwest’s sun, and probably permanently tanned by the Big Hot One he’d witnessed during the war. Thin-blooded from life in the desert, today Joe was bundled up as if he were flying to Siberia.

  The food arrived.

  “Now that’s what I call a burger,” Joe announced a few minutes later, Triple-O sauce dribbling down his fingers and his chin.

  “Want another?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Dad?”

  “Deal me in.”

  Beckoning to the waitress, Jackie placed an order for three more Triple-Os.

  “Crack the code,” Joe said.

  “Triple-O asks for extra relish and mayonnaise. That’s why you’re so messy.”

  “He isn’t messy,” Chuck said. “Red’s just old. Back home, he puts on a bib with a drool cup for every meal. After he straps on his geriatric Pampers.”

  “Okay, that’s it. Put up or shut up, son.” Joe planted an elbow on the table and held up his hand to arm-wrestle.

  “No way.” Chuck grimaced. “Look at the gunk on that paw. I’d be wrestling a greased pig.”

  “Speaking of pigs,” Joe said, “what’d you make of that Jap at the airport?”

  “Uh ... Red,” Jackie said diplomatically.

  “I know, I know. It ain’t PC. That’s why it’s not correct for you to use the word. But I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks. Back in the forties, every newspaper called them Japs. As did the president. So pardon me if that’s what I call the banzai brigade I fought. If it’s any consolation, the ones born after the war aren’t Japs. And you can bet your booty that Jap had a slur for me.”

  “You’re a pig, not a dog,” said Chuck.

  “And pigs don’t have paws,” countered Joe. He began to suck the relish off his fingers with gusto. “Damn, that’s good. If I’d had some of this Triple-O sauce at the airport, I’d have bitten the remaining digits off that goon, then spat the bones out at the puppet master.”

  “You’d be dead now, Red,” said Jackie.

  “I’ve whupped his kind before.”

  “I doubt he lost that finger in an industrial accident. I suspect that guy’s a yakuza. Offend the boss and that’s the price a Japanese gangster pays.”

  “I saw that movie,” Chuck said.

  “So did I,” said Joe.

  “Black Rain. With Michael Douglas.”

  “The Yakuza. Robert Mitchum.”

  “Let’s see your war trophy, Red,” said Jackie.

  Joe withdrew the prosthetic finger from his pocket and set it on the table.

  “Looks realistic. May I borrow it for a while?”

  “Why?” Joe asked.

  “To swab it for DNA. If it turns out that those thugs are up to no good, it might come in handy.”

  “My granddaughter the cop,” Joe said proudly, speaking to Chuck but nodding at Jackie. “So when do we get a tour of the stables where you work?”

  “After lunch.”

  The next round of burgers arrived just in time for Joe to mess up his sucked-clean fingers. “What do they call this creation?” he asked as he smacked his lips.

  “The Legendary.”

  “Gotta be a legend to go with that?”

  “Back in the twenties,” Jackie related, “this hustler called Nat started selling hot dogs at Athletic Park, an old baseball stadium. In time, he moved up to selling Triple-O burgers out of his Model T and had carhops running from vehicle to vehicle. They stuck cedar planks across the windows as trays. Nat made a fortune, and over the years his burgers became legendary.”

  “That’s how we’ll make our fortune,” Joe advised Chuck. “Corner the Triple-O franchise for the States.”

  “Before long, it’d no longer be Legendary, would it?” Jackie said. “Just super size.”

  “I blame you,” Joe groused.

  “Blame me for what?” asked Chuck.

  “Turning my only granddaughter into an un-American.”

  “Your fame precedes you, Red,” Jackie said over coffee. Having cleared the dishes, the waitress had wiped their table. Fetching a newspaper from her briefcase, the Mountie folded it back to a full-page feature, then set it down for the men to see.

  “Hell in the Pacific,” trumpeted a big black headline across the top of the page. That was followed by a photo collage and information on the upcoming Veterans of the Pacific Conference, where Colonel Joe “Red” Hett, who’d flown with the 509th Bomb Group, would be the keynote speaker. Introducing him would be his son, Colonel Chuck Hett, who’d recently retired from Strategic Air Command.

  “Heed my advice: don’t grow old,” said Joe, thumping his thumb down on a photo of himself as a crinkle-faced cowboy. Bookending Joe were picture arrays that captured the start and the finish of America’s involvement in the Second World War. In the middle of each was a photo of Joe striking back at the Rising Sun.

  “Handsome guy,” he said, pointing at the photo of him blasting his pistol at a Zero.

  “Is that really how you met Grandma?” Jackie asked.

  “Yeah,” Joe replied. “She saw that photo of me in Life and wrote to me in the Pacific. We corresponded all through the war, and the first thing I did after VJ day was travel to Indiana and look her up. We married a month later.”

  Jackie sighed. “Love at first sight.”

  “Yeah. Plus I was horny.”

  “Which spawned me,” said her dad.

  Chuck and Joe were the only family Jackie had left. Her mom and her grandma had died together in a car accident, and Jackie was an only child. It occurred to her that “only” was the greater part of “lonely,” and she felt content with both men here.

  “Striking photo,” Jackie said, indicating one of the shots flanking gun-blazing Joe.

  “Taken by a Kate. See the fish in the water?”

  “A Kate?”

  “A Nakajima B5N torpedo bomber. Who could remember a name like that? Or the Aichi D3A dive bomber? Or the Mitsubishi A6M fighter?”

  “Obviously you!”

  “I just wrote a speech.” He winked at her. “Anyway, we called the torpedo bombers Kates, t
he dive bombers Vals, and the fighters Zekes or Zeros. You’re looking down on Battleship Row. By ‘fish,’ I mean Japanese Long Lance torpedoes that had been adapted for shallow water.”

  “What am I seeing?”

  “Hell in the Pacific, like the headline says. The Japs were out to conquer Asia, and we got in the way. To contain them, we froze their assets in the States, slapped on an oil embargo, and stopped our exports to Japan. But we didn’t want to fight ’em, any more than we did the Nazis. Then the Japs turned their eyes on Southeast Asia, with all its oil and natural resources. They knew we’d react militarily to aggression in that region, and they figured if they hit us with a preemptive attack that knocked out the Pacific Fleet, we would sue for peace.”

  “They figured wrong,” Chuck said, “and turned what basically had been a European tussle between the Nazis and the Brits into a world war with us.”

  “But not before Pearl got hammered. Eighteen ships, including all eight battleships, were sunk or heavily damaged. Three hundred and fifty planes were smashed. More than two thousand servicemen died, and twelve hundred were wounded. Luckily, the Lexington and the Enterprise were out at sea, delivering aircraft to Midway and Wake islands, or the Japs would have got our carriers too.”

  Joe turned the paper around so Jackie could follow what he had to say about the photo.

  “The Kates came snarling in by twos and threes, past Hickam Field—where I blasted at the Zero—and dropped their fish into the harbor to slam into Battleship Row. As you can see, the boats are tied up nose to tail at moorings on that side of Ford Island. The single battleship in front is the California.”

  Bang! Joe hit it with his fist.

  “The California sinks. Those next two ships, side by side, are the Oklahoma and the Maryland. Behind them are the West Virginia and the Tennessee.”

  Bang! Bang! Joe pounded the outside ships, prompting looks from quizzical diners.

  “See the shockwaves in the water from the previous explosions? See the wakes of more torpedoes speeding in? The enormous spouts of water from where hulls have been hit are soaring higher than the funnels of the ships. The outside two are oozing oil and starting to list. The Ok is about to capsize, the West is gonna sink. Both ships on the inside are damaged, but they’ll stay afloat.”